Experimenting with cut-text
Jan. 28th, 2007 10:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cyphomandraI'd prefer it to be the book's title, but then if I have more than one book (and, at the moment, I do) the titles disappear. Putting my next line in makes that vanish, too, and gives it a strange significance on the header page. Maybe numbers? Or repeat the title?
Child's Play. I have put this somewhere in my room and cannot find it, but it’s a good book from the point of view of developing Sergeant Wield, who I like a lot as a character – he’s impenetrably ugly, efficient and, until this book, deeply closeted. I have forgotten most of the A plot – something to do with intrafamily arguing after a will? There’s a mousy woman who works as a legal secretary in a key role? – but the B plot has Wield getting entangled with an opportunistic blackmailer. Who is, as Hill’s characters usually are, both more and less than just that.
Deadheads. Hard to discuss this without giving away the ending. I read it kneeling on the floor of a bookshop about a year ago, when I couldn’t find a library copy, and was slightly startled by it. It’s hard to judge how it works as a detective story because of this, and it’s early enough in the series that things are still settling down. The new police recruit, Singh, is an interesting character, particularly watching him try and shift, with some regrets, from mixing with his friends to using them for information. Again, fits in as part of a series, where not everything gets sorted out in one book (without, necessarily, having cliffhangers), and it’s nice to see the characters cropping up again in later books.
Bones and Silence. Part of a subseries in which Hill seems to be quietly experimenting with forcing Pascoe into a nervous breakdown (see also: Underworld, The Wood Beyond, On Beulah Height). Mysterious letter writers, a mystery play for the whole community with nonactors as key cast members (Dalziel, obviously, is God), and a murder/suicide witnessed by Dalziel that does not accord with the testimony of any of the survivors. Good bits, odd whole.
Recalled to Life. This one, frankly, lost me, although part of it may have been that all the Tale of Two Cities references (and the opening, a 1960s Britain spoof of the Dickens original, is very well done) made me wish I was reading that instead. Early in Dalziel’s career, he assisted on a case involving murder amongst the upper classes. The woman convicted for this is now being released, having served her term – but there is now evidence that she was not, in fact, guilty, and a witch-hunt is rapidly developing. Part of the problem for me was losing track of the characters, because so much is backstory, and then there’s Dalziel’s detour to the US, which dances very carefully along the border of being some sort of bizarre Yorkshire version of Crocodile Dundee. I also wondered why a character firmly in place at the end of this book has vanished completely, with never a word spoken, at the beginning of the next… and then found out, in Good Morning, Midnight.
Child's Play. I have put this somewhere in my room and cannot find it, but it’s a good book from the point of view of developing Sergeant Wield, who I like a lot as a character – he’s impenetrably ugly, efficient and, until this book, deeply closeted. I have forgotten most of the A plot – something to do with intrafamily arguing after a will? There’s a mousy woman who works as a legal secretary in a key role? – but the B plot has Wield getting entangled with an opportunistic blackmailer. Who is, as Hill’s characters usually are, both more and less than just that.
Deadheads. Hard to discuss this without giving away the ending. I read it kneeling on the floor of a bookshop about a year ago, when I couldn’t find a library copy, and was slightly startled by it. It’s hard to judge how it works as a detective story because of this, and it’s early enough in the series that things are still settling down. The new police recruit, Singh, is an interesting character, particularly watching him try and shift, with some regrets, from mixing with his friends to using them for information. Again, fits in as part of a series, where not everything gets sorted out in one book (without, necessarily, having cliffhangers), and it’s nice to see the characters cropping up again in later books.
Bones and Silence. Part of a subseries in which Hill seems to be quietly experimenting with forcing Pascoe into a nervous breakdown (see also: Underworld, The Wood Beyond, On Beulah Height). Mysterious letter writers, a mystery play for the whole community with nonactors as key cast members (Dalziel, obviously, is God), and a murder/suicide witnessed by Dalziel that does not accord with the testimony of any of the survivors. Good bits, odd whole.
Recalled to Life. This one, frankly, lost me, although part of it may have been that all the Tale of Two Cities references (and the opening, a 1960s Britain spoof of the Dickens original, is very well done) made me wish I was reading that instead. Early in Dalziel’s career, he assisted on a case involving murder amongst the upper classes. The woman convicted for this is now being released, having served her term – but there is now evidence that she was not, in fact, guilty, and a witch-hunt is rapidly developing. Part of the problem for me was losing track of the characters, because so much is backstory, and then there’s Dalziel’s detour to the US, which dances very carefully along the border of being some sort of bizarre Yorkshire version of Crocodile Dundee. I also wondered why a character firmly in place at the end of this book has vanished completely, with never a word spoken, at the beginning of the next… and then found out, in Good Morning, Midnight.
